El Nino Could Mean Milder Winter for Michigan

If predictions hold true, the golfing season could be extended and southeast Michiganders may enjoy a milder winter with less snowfall this year. (Patch file photo by Beth Dalbey)

» Get Patch’s daily newsletter and real-time news alerts.

An El Niño weather pattern over the tropical Pacific could mean a milder weather – as in less snow and warmer temperatures — for Michigan.

Models show there’s a 95 percent chance the El Niño pattern will continue through winter, Tom Di Liberto, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center in College Park, MD, told the Detroit Free Press.

The El Niño would be the strongest one in decades.

“It could potentially be top-three in terms of its strength going back to 1950. When we have a stronger El Niño, it means a stronger influence on weather and climate patterns in the United States,” Di Liberto said. “The connection is usually strongest in the winter.”

The World Meteorological Organization said the last strong El Niño occurred in 1997-98, but since then, there has been a reduction in the amount of Arctic sea ice and Northern Hemisphere snow cover, Weather.com said.

“We have had years of record Arctic sea ice minimum. We have lost a massive area of Northern Hemisphere snow cover, probably by more than 1 million square kilometers in the past 15 years. We are working on a different planet and we fully do not understand the new patterns emerging.”

The warmer winter is good news for freighters, which have faced logistical problems getting through thick ice floes on the Great Lakes. It could also mean less snow-melt in the spring that carries farm nutrients into rivers and lakes, including Lake Erie, where summer algae blooms threaten water supplies in parts of southeast Michigan and Ohio.

But, overall, it’s a signal of climate change, according to David Carlson, director of the WMO’s World Climate Research program. Whether El Niño weather patterns will increase in frequency is difficult to predict.

“We have no precedent,” Carlson said, according to Weather.com. Climate change is increasingly going to put us in this situation. We don’t have a previous event like this.”

El Niño is an anomalous, yet periodic, warming of the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean. For reasons meteorologists still don’t understand well, that part of the ocean warms every two to seven years, for periods of sex to 18 months.

The WMO forecast mirrors the El Niño forecast update released by the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration in mid-August. In that forecast update, the NOAA said El Niño has an 85 percent chance of lasting into spring – an increase of 5 percent over NOAA’s update in July.

NOAA’s forecast for Michigan from December-February calls for temperatures that are higher than normal for most of Michgian, 1.5 degrees warmer than average in the northern Lower Peninsula and Upper Peninsula.

Metro Detroit should receive a half-inch less precipitation than normal during those months, while the western side of the state, which typically gets hit hard with lake-effect snow coming off Lake Michigan, could see 2.5 inches less.

However, nothing is guaranteed with an El Niño weather pattern, Di Liberto told the Free Press.

“But if you wanted it to be warmer than average and drier than average this winter, you would want to see the El Niño models we’re showing right now,” he said. “El Niño loads the dice, so to speak. But it doesn’t mean you can’t roll snake-eyes.”